MARK SIMPSON .com

To paraphrase the world’s most famously dissatisfied customer Mr Praline (played by an eloquently irate Python, John Cleese), I know a dead parrot when I see one and I’m looking at one now.  The retrosexual is dead. He has ceased to be. If marketers hadn’t nailed ‘im to the perch ‘e’d be pushing up the daisies.  He’s an ex-parrot.

When I first used the metrosexual antonym in 2003, I used it merely to refer to men who were not metrosexual - what most people still liked to call ‘real men’.

Remember those? 

Four years on, it seems the word ‘retrosexual’ is on everyone’s lips in the US - especially marketers keen to sell even more vanity products to men.  But ironically the US media’s love-affair with the retrosexual as a supposed antidote to the queerness and self-consciousness of the metrosexual just reveals what a sorry state ‘real’ masculinity is in.  It has shuffled off it’s mortal coil and joined the choir invisible. If I was an American, I’d ask for my bleedin’ money back.

Did real masculinity even exist in the first place, I wonder?  Or was it just some 1940s Hollywood daydream?  Or a 1980s Jeff Stryker video?

But whether ’real men’ are called ‘John Wayne’ or ‘Marion Robert Morrison’ (Wayne’s given name) or ’hung the size and shape of a baby dolphin’ is somewhat moot now as in the 21st Century the male has been thoroughly mediated, accessorised and monetised - and turned into another way of making men even more self-conscious and consumerist.  As this item from last week’s Newsweek makes clear, retrosexuals are now metrosexuals with implanted chest hair:

Measuring 6 feet 3, with chiseled pecs and a bushy beard, George seemed like a model of manliness. Yet two years ago the 47-year-old Virginia businessman (who declined to give his full name to protect his privacy) decided he didn’t look quite macho enough. So he went to see Dr. Jeffrey Epstein, a Miami hair-restoration surgeon, to have 3,000 hair follicles ripped from his scalp and transplanted into his face, chest and belly. He wasn’t satisfied. So a year later he returned to get an additional 2,400 grafts done. “I could still have another surgery and not be completely covered,” says George today. “I’m very pleased, but 2,400 grafts is not a very hairy chest.”

I’ll take your word for it.  But I wonder how many grafts a very hairy chest is.

George’s quest for maximum hirsuteness isn’t as unusual as it may sound. He’s part of a growing group of “retrosexuals”- men who shun metrosexuality, with its often feminine esthetic, in favor of old-school masculinity. 

Old-school masculinity that perceives itself as chronically lacking in masculinity, is obsessed with its appearance, and resorts to painful and costly cosmetic surgery of a questionable effect to make itself more attractive, more worthy of love, more ‘manly’ - and up-to-date with current furry fashion trends.  As Mr Praline would say: you’re ‘avin’ a larf, mate!

Cosmetic and hair-transplant surgeons on both coasts report increases in patients seeking a more rugged look: hairier chests and beards, squarer chins, more angular jaw lines. Dr. Paul Nassif, a well-known Beverly Hills plastic surgeon, has noticed the change in the photos patients bring in to show him their ideal image. A few years ago “they were bringing in a pretty-boy look,” he says. Now, though, the requests are different: ” ‘Give me a big, strong, manlier chin’,” he says.

No doubt they were bringing in clippings of ‘manly’ models and celebrities from the very same glossy magazines from which they previously clipped images of ‘pretty-boys’.  Some of them were probably the same models and celebs, now sporting those de rigeur manicured beards.  Like David Beckham, Brad Pitt, Jake Gyllenhaal, Justin Timberlake et al.

These cosmetic surgery fashion victims clearly aren’t retrosexuals.  They aren’t even metrosexuals with faux chest hair.  These are male-to-male transsexuals. 

And like many male-to-female trannys, they’ll probably never be really satisfied with the results.  After all, neither 2,400 nor 24,000 grafts are a ‘really’ hairy chest.  It’s in the nature of consumerism - no, desire itself - that we always want what we don’t have.  I happen to have a ‘really hairy’ chest - but I’m still shaving mine, despite the appalled intervention of my gay host in LA when I visited a couple of years ago, who snatched the razor out of my hands and told me in no uncertain terms that ‘No one gay shaves their chests any more!’.  Like metrosexuality itself, faux retrosexuality was pioneered by the gays.

Perhaps Newsweek’s retrosexuals should go about shopping for the manly traits they desire in truly retro fashion - by going cruising.  Even if it’s bad for business.  As the punchline of the Python’s Parrot Sketch has it, after the owner admits the parrot he sold is in fact deceased and that has no more in stock:

Owner: (quietly) D’you…. d’you want to come back to my place?

Mr. Praline: (looks around) Yeah, all right, sure.

By Mark Simpson, (The Guardian, 8 Aug 2007)

The Phalliban, America ’s killjoy campaign against the male body’s, er, maleness, strikes yet again.

The 2008 Fire Department of New York Calendar of Heroes, the eleventh in series of snaps of buffed young firemen stripped to the waist which produces mass hysteria on the streets of NY on its release every year - along with large amounts of cash for the FDNY - will be the last.

Why? Because it might make the good people of New York think of firemen’s hoses.

Calendar coverboy 22-year-old Michael Biserta (above) has caused a scandal because he briefly got his semi-erect hose out in the video ‘Boys Gone Wild’ in 2004 - some time before he even joined the FDNY.

For the sake of research, you understand, I’ve viewed the clip (it’s because in the Net Age images never go away that this scandal has happened). And let me just say that Biserta’s fire-fighting equipment will have no trouble extinguishing the tallest flames.

Fire Commissioner Nicholas Scoppetta is not impressed, however, and has ordered the scrapping of future calendars. Brooklyn DA Charles Hynes, himself a former fire commissioner (and, judging by his penchant for double entendre, also an avid Are You Being Served fan) agrees, telling the press straight facedly: ‘You can’t allow anything that tarnishes the reputation of the people on the job.’

Not being American, I’m not sure how the fact that a fireman flashed his large fire axe to consenting adults before he became a fireman tarnishes the reputation of the people ‘on the job’, or anywhere else.

Unless you’re just jealous. Or penises frighten you. (Admittedly, Biserta’s is slightly scary.)

And, Captain Peacock, isn’t a spot of polishing, French or otherwise, the usual way to deal with tarnishing?

I could understand if the FDNY was worried that Biserta’s hot body might be starting more fires than it puts out. Instead it seems like just another example of the puritanical American Phalliban trying to turn back the commodification cock that American consumerism started ticking. In the UK its difficult to imagine that a topless fireman calendar would be banned because one of them had once got their big pump out on video. Instead, they’d probably be given their own TV show. Over in France, the Dieux du Stade calendar featuring starkers professional rugby players covered in baby oil with their balls out sells like hot croissants - and no scandal erupts.

The US clearly has a different attitude towards the male member, even if many people are convinced it’s currently led by one. Recently the city council in Kaiser , Oregon was forced to promise to remove some traffic bollards because people complained they looked ‘too much like penises’. In other words, bollards. During the filming of last year’s Superman Returns the biggest preoccupation was how to keep Superman’s Spandexed bulge from… bulging.

This year the posters for a film called ‘Pride’ about Philadelphia ’s first black swim team were nearly banned by the hawkeyed American Motion Picture Association because they were convinced that the package of one of the black swimmers in the background had been ‘digitally enhanced’. (It hadn’t, and it wasn’t even particularly ‘proud’.)

I realise that post 9-11 the FDNY has been sanctified. That they are now all ‘heroes’. But nowadays amateur porn stars can be heroes too. Especially if they’re hung as heroically as Biserta.

The real problem here is that Biserta’s showing-off before he became a fire-fighter was a little too explicit. The fact the coverboy had got his actual cock out instead of his hose outed the pornolizing of the male body going on in the culture that the FDNY calendars themselves are part of. Which freaked out the old men running the FDNY who probably never liked those faggy calendars anyway.

Many of the glossy images in the calendars, like the one on the cover, are deliberately phallic and fetishistic. Look at the way a ‘pumped’ and ‘ripped’ Biserta is holding his big shiny red fire axe with both hands, over that huge butch metal clip apparently keeping his flies together.

Even the Statue of Liberty, looking on, has erected her arm - which has, understandably, burst into flames. Unlike the old grey men who run the FDNY, she’s an American who knows how to salute a prodigiously well-equipped young fireman when she sees one.

You can see that incendiary Biserta clip on Xtube here.

Tip: Donald Krolak

Men are from Mars and women from Venus. Or so yaketty male American self-help gurus who want to be loved keep telling us.

But according to recent research both men and women actually turn out to be lunatics that can’t shut up.

These findings may or may not explain the behaviour of the general population, but they certainly would explain American self-help gurus.

In the Middle Ages, sodomy was thought to be caused not by hair whorls, but by drunkeness.

As this spornographic clip shows, they were absolutely right.

The post-match beery bonding of the lovely lads of Sandbach RUFC - which, be warned, includes very male nudity, heavy petting and male-on-male snogging - made me feel faint with jealousy.

And also faintly redundant.

These straight lads’ eagerness to perform their manly love for one another in front of UK TV cameras (for an instalment of an ITV2 series last month called ‘Generation Xcess’) does away with the need for my:

• essay on hazing, in which I argued that male bonding is deeply homoerotic, but that despite this it is not a ‘gay’ thing - it’s a ‘guy’ thing

• pointing out the size queenery of straight men.

• explaining how little purchase the Phalliban has in the UK - compared to the US where it has a tighter grip than Captain Tim’s team-mates have on his ‘massive cock’

• arguing that homoerotic fantasy that Sporno advertising sells us is not entirely baseless

• responding to those who adamantly refuse to believe that straight men could get naked with one another on camera and play with each other’s dangly bits when offered lots of cash. (These ones did it for a few beers.)

Instead of all my scribbling, I just needed to take a video camera to a pub in Sandbach on Saturday night and buy a few rounds. It would have been a lot more fun too.

Funny that this should have surfaced around the same time as this spornographic ad campaign for Paris - which after the salty mantics of Sandbach RUFC now looks like a slightly coy promotion for a copycat programme featuring a less attractive, less ballsy team.

But perhaps the most ‘touching’ part of all this groping is the way this (highly successful) team of rugger buggers refuse to be embarrassed by the naughty clips the programme makers make them watch in the cold-sober light of day. Instead they seem quite proud. But then, they have much to be proud of. Especially their Captain.

Alas, I suspect that some - gay and straight - spiteful members of the Great British Public who saw the doc did their best to make these young men feel ashamed for being ‘gay’ with one another - to make them feel ashamed, in fact, for being fit, virile lads full of life, laughs, spunk and puppyish enthusiasm for masculinity. (Actually, the more I think about it, and what I’m missing, I’m beginning to feel spiteful too….)

Worse than this though is the way the clip ends before the programme does.

Anyone have the final segment? Or a better quality version?

As the completely unabashed grinning donkey-hung, bubble-butted Captain Tim says, ‘We should watch that again.’

Update: I’ve just been informed that a better quality clip is available, along with rather a lot of other athletes showing off their, er, sporting prowess, at the premium adult site: www.ruggerbugger.com

The Times of London argues, in a lengthy and quite serious piece by Matthew Syed, that David Beckham deserves a knighthood not so much for being a great footballer but rather for being ‘the prime catalyst in the metrosexual revolution.’

So Becks deserves to be awarded the highest honour in the land and made a Knight of the Most Noble Order of the Garter for preening, posing, and symbolically waving his legs in the air and showing an entire generation how to wave their legs in the air too?

Seems fair enough.

After all, unlike most knights he’ll look great in stockings.

According to MSN Money (‘The rise of the metrosexual economy’) sales of male cosmetics in Boots, the leading UK High Street drugstore have risen by 800% since 2000, making it ‘by far and away the fastest growing sector in the cosmetics and beauty industry.’ Datamonitor predicts the ‘male grooming’ market to be worth $1.5B next year and male spas and ‘grooming salons’ are rapidly expanding.

As a sign of how times have changed - and how mainstream metrosexuality now is - the journalist Matthew Plowright begins the article relating how he and his mates spent twenty minutes in a pub, probably one in London, pints in hand, discussing moisturisers, facial scrubs and even St Tropez tans.

That’s nothing. Last night I was in a pub in a rough-and-ready North Yorkshire market town discussing skin regimens with a small group of lads in their early twenties. A chain-smoking hard-drinking Geordie squaddie truck driver gave me advice on how to achieve a perfect complexion: ‘I swear by Witch Hazel wipes, me.’

Cock and crack and ball-shaving was also discussed. (They brought the subject up. Honest.)

All turned out to be enthusiastic practitioners and were keen to offer me tips. Several admitted that they shaved their whole body. More than one was keen to show me their handiwork.

However, data from my informal rural focus group suggests the size of the metrosexual market may have been underestimated. Or rather, that women are paying for much of male metrosexuality. And probably having to clear up the mess.

It turns out that most of the lads were using their girlfriend’s LadyShave.

Simon Doonan at the NY Obsever notices that metrosexuality isn’t dead after all and is busily getting straight men’s legs in the air:

Straight guys need to ditch their new aesthetic preoccupations, stop trying to turn themselves into sleazy porn studs, and go back to being drones and bread-winners. You fellows were the last bastion of self-denying un-vanity, and now look! Between your plucked privates and John Edwards’ $400 haircut, the entire social structure of America has been thrown into a reeling dis-equilibrium. Between the gays and the gals there are enough queens in the hive already. Throw away the Nair, put your Dockers and golf shirts back on, and get back to work.

It is, as Doonan obviously is aware, a forlorn hope. Straight American males have tasted the Royal Jelly and won’t accept Jell-O any more.

Or shit sticking to their man-fur.

Tip: Peter McQuaid

The world of straight trade may have long since disappeared from the streets of London but if you still hanker after that lost economy of boisterousness, straight nightclub toilets might be a frutiful place to loiter. Preferably with a line or two of coke (Colombia’s own Gay Bomb).

Though you might have to be, like Stefan Postma’s ex girlfriend, Arthur rather than Martha. At least judging by this story related by Mike. [Thanks to mutual friend Dermod who passed this anecdote on to me on the grounds that this is ’such a Mark Simpson story’.

Mike was recently having dinner with a special chum at cheap Thai restaurant in London. They were trying manfully to mind their own homo business. This was a little difficult to do since at the - indecently close – table next to them a beefy blond Cockney wide-boy and a huge Nigerian began having an argument about some business deal that had gone tits up.

Things become somewhat heated and they start slagging off, as you do, each other’s birds, for several minutes.

Provoked beyond endurance, Beefy Cockney finally blurts out, ‘Well, at least I don’t get BUMMED UP THE FUCKIN’ ARSE IN CLUB TOILETS!!’

Outraged, Huge Nigerian hotly denies this terrible slur for ten whole minutes. Before finally conceding, under his breath, ‘Ok, Ok, it was just the once though, and you know I was off my head.’

‘Besides,’ he adds, ‘it’s not like you never done it yourself!’

‘THAT’S A FUCKIN’ LIE AN’ YOU KNOW IT!’ retorts Beefy Cockney, really angry now.

Five minutes later they had both conceded that they’d been done up the arse regularly.

Finally Beefy Cockney turns to Mike (who has been pretending for the past twenty minutes not to be hanging on every word of this exchange) and asks, straight-faced: ‘Mate, can you settle somefink for us? If you saw both of us walking down the street, which one would you say looked a bit bent?’

‘Hmm, I think it would be hard to tell,’ Mike replies, in all honesty. Then he turns the question around: ‘Do you think I look a bit bent?’

‘Nah,’ replies Beefy Cockney. ‘But your mate does.’

Next month sees the 40th anniversary of the decriminalisation of homosexuality in England and Wales. To celebrate, I thought I’d post this piece about the pre-gay Good Old Days which appeared in the IoS a couple of years ago (and which seems to have mysteriously disappeared from their website).

I consider myself something of a traditionalist. I enjoy traditional activities, such as cruising the Dilly, picking up guardsmen, sailors, dockers and young working men.

I am, in other words, a hopeless romantic. For trade, the masculine erotic economy which girded the loins of the greatest city in the world, lubricated the pistons of the greatest Empire and made saucy sense of the British class system is gone forever. The docks have gone, the sailors and guardsmen are all but gone - and, criminally, don’t wear their uniforms on the street any more, making them very difficult to spot. And as for the working men, well, they all live so far out of town these days and drive so fast in their white vans that it’s almost impossible to collar any.

All that’s left is a gay disco in the East End called Trade, where you can find shirtless gay lawyers on horse-tranquillizers eyeing one another up while dancing frantically at 5am. If you really want to.

Gone too are the painted queans, such as Quentin Crisp, and the respectable gentlemen in evening dress who pursued trade - who, for sex, for violence, for love, for money, for a few beers, for something to tell their mates about, frequently allowed themselves to be caught. Gone are the jostling, smoke-filled “known” (not “gay”) pubs. Gone is the whole vibrant and complex pre-gay bachelor world of male-male intimate relations that meant that perhaps most sexual activity between men before the 1967 decriminalisation involved men who were not queer. What we now call “homosexuality” or “the gay scene” was a much, much bigger business before so-called liberalisation.

Contrary to received wisdom, today’s out-and-proud gay world is in many ways a marginalised, airless, incestuous one compared to what went before in the “bad old days”. It’s only in the last 30 years or so, in other words, the period corresponding to the rise of “gay liberation”, that we have begun to believe that to have sex with another male you have to belong to a separate species; that, regardless of your interest in the ladies, if you wake up in bed with another male you have to move to Old Compton Street or the Castro.

As Houlbrook’s Queer London: Perils and Pleasures in the Sexual Metropolis 1918-1957 makes remarkably clear, just a few decades ago, significant numbers of (working-class) young men were not only moving freely between male and female partners but were happy to brag about it. So long as they were “butch” and active - or claimed they were - it would merely enhance their reputation with the lads. It certainly didn’t mean that they were “confused about their sexuality”.

Though you, dear reader, may be about theirs. It is, after all, a world that is almost unintelligible to us today. Even my nostalgia for “traditional” activities is precisely that: nostalgia. A slightly perverse, contemporary projection on to the past - a past that is now too “queer” and unfamiliar to grasp fully, possibly even by those who are still alive to remember it. As Houlbrook puts it: “Working class encounters with the queer transcended contemporary understandings of ‘homosexuality’ or ‘homophobia’. Intimacy, sex, blackmail, theft, and assault constituted a continuum…” A rather more exciting continuum than most homos today can handle - or would want to.

Perhaps this is why many gays today simply refuse to believe such a world existed, except as some failed prototype for the wonderful, self-contained, self-centred gay world they now live in: “God, all those poor oppressed self-hating homos chasing after straight men - why didn’t they get themselves down to the gym and buy some camouflage trousers?”

Thankfully, Houlbrook isn’t one of those gays. He’s a historian. “The world mapped out in this book is not a ‘gay’ world as we would currently understand it,” he writes. “The places are different. Soho has retained its importance, but today it seems almost impossible that Waterloo Road or Edgware Road could have been the site of equally important, diverse, extensive, and vital queer enclaves between the wars.” Edgware Road was the site of a large barracks; Waterloo Road the home of the Union Jack Club, a hotel for hundreds of randy young sailors on leave. As one contemporary put it: “The Waterloo Road was awash with seamen, most of whose bodies… were not only able but willing.”

Queer London, with chapters on “Geographies of Public Sex” and “Piccadilly Palare: the world of the West End poof” (spot the Moz reference) goes out of its way to present a map of London’s queer past that doesn’t merely see it as a world that was struggling to turn into Soho during Pride Week: “In exploring the history of queer London in the first half of the 20th century, we should lament possibilities long lost as we celebrate opportunities newly acquired.”

Obviously, it is the lost possibility of sex - and loving relationships - with sailors, soldiers and young working men men that I most lament. So does Houlbrook; or, at least, he sees this as the crucial difference between London’s contemporary gay world and its queer past. Unlike many other recent urban gay historys, this book gives equal attention to those who considered themselves “normal” but nonetheless socialised with, had sex with, and often loved other men. In other words: trade. The men who were at the very centre of the queer erotic economy and without whom Saturday nights in 1930s Soho would have been very dull indeed.

So we learn that “the most distinctive venues” were either military pick-up joints like the Grenadier (Wilton Place), Tattershalls Tavern (Knightsbridge Green), the Alexandra Hotel (Hyde Park Corner), and the Packenham and Swan (I’ll be visiting them all very soon, just to make sure they’re no longer “in business”); or those in working-class neighbourhoods in east and south London: dockside pubs like the Prospect of Whitby (Wapping Stairs), or Charlie Brown’s (West India Dock Road). In these venues, dock labourers, sailors from across the world, and families “mingled freely with flamboyant local queans and slumming gentlemen in a protean milieu where queer men and casual homosexual encounters were an accepted part of everyday life”. Perhaps Houlbrook is a little nostalgic too, after all.

To regard London’s trading scene as merely “prostitution” or “exploitation”, as many are inclined, is again to impose modern, patronising values on transactions: “Working men’s desires were more complex than the term ‘prostitution’ allows.” Money was not always exchanged (especially with sailors), but even when it was, most of the “normal” men trading themselves had jobs. For the most part, trade was an enjoyable and rewarding past-time activity that could also become a lasting emotional attachment.

Guardsman were notoriously rough renters (very capable of blackmail and violence, which was perhaps part of their appeal), but as one interviewed in 1960 admitted: “Some of us get quite fond of the blokes we see regularly… they’re nice fellows… and interesting to listen to. As for the sex… some of the younger ones aren’t bad looking…”

Or like the newly married Jim writing rather sweetly to his gentleman friend, John Lehmann: “I wish I was still seeing you Jack as you were the best friend I ever had… you were always such a good friend to me we had good times together Jack and I hope I shall see you some time.” Trade was a young man’s game, which usually lasted only for the period between adolescence and marriage. Once married, working-class men and their unruly erections would “move on”.

Why did the world of trade end? In part, because, like Jim, it got married. The post-war years saw a rise in prosperity which not only undermined the economic rationale for trade, it also made marriage possible much sooner. Rather than getting married in their late twenties and early thirties, young men were marrying in their late teens and early twenties. The rough and tumble world of “raucous male homosociality” was disappearing. Young men were socialising much more with women, who were now entering public life with money to spend themselves (and today, if the tabloid stories are to be believed, are lining up to be smuggled into Knightsbridge Barracks). Trade ended because the bachelor-culture of pre-war London ended.

Ironically, the final blow to trade and the public world of queer sex was delivered by Wolfenden Report of 1957 and the Act which decriminalised sex between consenting adult males in private 10 years later.

Key Wolfenden witnesses, Patrick Trevor-Roper (a Harley Street consultant) and Peter Wildeblood (diplomatic correspondent for The Daily Mail) pleaded for homosexual respectability in the language of the private middle-class home (sounding uncannily like gay marriage lobbyists today). Wildeblood claimed: “I seek only to apply to my life the rules which govern the lives of all good men; freedom to choose a partner and… to live with him discreetly and faithfully… the right to choose the person whom I love.”

However, as Houlbrook points out, both witnesses glossed over the queer spaces in which they were going to meet that partner. Wildeblood famously met the airman McNally in a Piccadilly Circus subway; Trevor-Roper was cautioned by a policeman in St James’s Park, a veritable bazaar for strapping Guardsman during the war.

To which I might add that for Wolfenden the “real perverts” were not the “congenital inverts”, but the “otherwise normal men” who took part in these aberrant activities, often in public. This is why prosecutions for indecency actually doubled in the 10 years following “decriminalisation” in 1967 (many of those convicted were married). Wolfenden, which was also a report into street prostitution, encouraged the law to go after the “real perverts”. All male sexual contact involving those under 21, those staying in hostels or hotels, rooming houses or prison, meeting in parks and pubic toilets (they were not “in private”), or while serving in the Armed Forces and Merchant Navy, remained illegal. In other words, probably the vast majority of homosex in the earlier part of the 20th century.

Even the consensual activities that led to the Montagu Scandal and public backlash which prompted the Wolfenden Report and eventually the 1967 reform itself would still have been illicit after ‘decriminalisation’ as they involved members of the RAF and were not conducted ‘in private’ - and would remain so for much of the next 40 years.

It’s probably just more sour grapes on my part, but it’s tempting to conclude that the law reforms of the last few years, such as the equalisation of the age of consent, ending the ban in the Armed Forces and Merchant Navy, and relaxation of the laws against “indecency” in public, happened not so much because of the tireless campaigns by gay equality reformers, or even the intervention of the European Court of Human Rights, but simply because, one or two cruisey parks aside, most “traditional activities” in London had already come to an end.

Copyright Mark Simpson 2007

This example of revenge sporno from last year seems to have slipped through my fingers….

‘Top’ Dutch footballer and former Aston Villa goalie Stefan Postma was a tad embarrassed last year to find a home-made video of himself enthusiastically bottoming, that’s to say, taking it up the Arsenal, plastered all over the ‘net’.

The chap doing the ’scoring’? Well, it was actually an (embittered) ex lady friend wearing a strapadicktome.

Another reason why man-shagging should be a man’s job. At least if they’re cute and blond and have thick necks. (I can keep a secret lads, honest!)

In this spornographic age it’s going to get out there anyway. And at least if they put it out there themselves they’ll make money out of it rather than fritter it away fruitlessly trying to keep the dirty thing under wraps. Most importantly, they’ll be able to make sure its edited in a flattering fashion. And it does make you rather more famous: I for one had never heard of Stefan Postma before; now I’m one of his greatest fans.

Though probably if sportsmen want to maximise sales they should pretend it was released without their consent.

Much was made of the ‘bizarre’ nature of the ‘kinky sex’ depicted. But why is it so strange that a straight man should want to get shagged up the arse? After all, if God hadn’t wanted men to get bummed he wouldn’t have given them prostate glands. A very convincing and attractive tranny pal who went through a great deal of pain trouble and expense to have the ‘op’ tells me that the first thing that straight men ask her once she’s told them she used to be a geezer is: ‘Will you shag me up the arse with a dildo??’ The next question is, ‘What’s the biggest one you’ve got??’

Probably the most shocking thing to most football fans is how clearly and audibly Stefan is enjoying being ploughed (and watching himself being ploughed in the mirror and, no doubt, in the video afterwards, repeatedly). Some of them will be thinking: ‘He seems to be enjoying taking that a lot more than I do giving it.’ Traditional heterosexuality’s rigid, or sometimes semi-erect, sexual division of labour depends on men not thinking too much about whether they’re getting a bum deal.

Or women. Interesting that no one seems to have considered that the lady friend in the video might be enjoying it too. She certainly sounds like it. For all we know, it might have been her idea. There are a lot of naughty ladies out there who don’t just lie back and think of Sunderland, and not all of them are trannies.

Now, after all those words, here’s what you really wanted: a clip of the strap-on video.